Hello dear readers and greetings from Illinois, where I've been hiding out in my air conditioned bunker while the temperature outside breaks the triple digits. It's been nearly 100 days since the last DonationCoder newsletter, so this is going to be a big one. I apologize that it's taken so long to get this one out, and I promise it won't take so long to get out the next one. The last time we talked we were just kicking off our March fundraiser, which turned out to be a wonderful success. A huge thank you goes out to everyone who donated and cheered us on. The fundraisers have such an invigorating effect on the site -- I can't overstate the morale boost they provide. Thank you all.

On other news, we've been very steadily working on the transition to a new content management system for the website, which will make it a little easier for us to update and maintain content. DC member Mitzevo is leading the project and the new site layout looks great. Unfortunately, it's proving a not insignificant challenge that we have so many different esoteric areas of the website, so we still have quite a ways to go -- but that's the nature of the site so what can you do? Ok enough rambling, onto the newsletter sections!

2. User-to-User: Your Input Requested

We love nothing more than having interesting discussions on our forum -- and we love when new people participate in the discussions. In each newsletter we try to highlight a few topics that we think might interest casual readers and that are good candidates for making your first post.

DC member Skwire has been unstoppable on the Coding Snacks area of our forum -- writing new freeware utilities on request, and constantly releasing updates for his existing tools. Lots of new updates this month, plus one big new one for comic book archive readers:

The Coding Snacks section is one of the things that people love the most about DonationCoder -- it's where anyone can post a request for a custom piece of software -- and often find the requests granted overnight by one of the coders who inhabit the forum (like DC members Ath, MilesAhead, c.gingerich, 4wd, and others).

Almost half the posts on the DC forum take the form of general software discussions, questions, recommendations, etc. These posts wind up in the General Software Discussion section and make it one of the most active sections of the DC forum. This is a great resource if you're trying to solve a software or hardware-related problem. We get so much traffic on this board that we split the recent content into two sections in the newsletter - general software and specific software discussions.

The title of this section shouldn't scare you off - there is definitely something of interest for everyone here! It's more than just a section for the discussion of software development, it's also where we discuss web design, entrepreneurial ideas, and general productivity issues. It's great to see that the section has been pretty active recently.

Somehow the domain that the newsletter sends out from (donationcodernews.com) wasn't set to autorenew and briefly expired last week. That means that some percentage of recipients of the newsletter never got it. Sorry! The domain is back now so all should be good going forward.

I wish i could do something about google and yahoo sending the newsletter to spam, but as you might expect, big companies like that don't care about us or what we want. It's their world and they make the rules.

the spam thing is because of the wording of the extra sentence: "100 days of summer slumber" -may sound like an invitation to something else..., you know. My trusted contacts will also be spam-classified if they use ambiguous words of such kind. I read my emails online on my ISP ("Internet service provider") account, and I actually have two emails in my spam folder, send from my ISP and blocked by my ISP!!

I wish i could do something about google and yahoo sending the newsletter to spam, but as you might expect, big companies like that don't care about us or what we want. It's their world and they make the rules.

I wish i could do something about google and yahoo sending the newsletter to spam, but as you might expect, big companies like that don't care about us or what we want. It's their world and they make the rules.

Somehow the domain that the newsletter sends out from (donationcodernews.com) wasn't set to autorenew and briefly expired last week. That means that some percentage of recipients of the newsletter never got it. Sorry! The domain is back now so all should be good going forward.